GOD AND MAN

MUTANT X #16 (MARVEL COMICS)

“In another place–in another life–Alex Summers led a team of mutants in a battle against oppression. His methods were extreme, his tactics questionable, but–in his soul–he knew that he was fighting for the greater good.

Now that soul has been transferred to another world, and Summers, also known as Havok, has found himself living a lie, allied with a team of mutants who are sinister, parallel versions of his friends and family. It is to this dark, new place that Havok has come, where he stands as a man alone… a mutant alone. Alex Summers is Mutant X.

Fear him. Fear for him.”

25 years ago, Marvel Comics launched Mutant X, a Havok led X-spinoff. I recently came into a complete run of the series, and so now I’m going to re-read the series once a week, and you guys get to come along for the ride!

This week, the team takes a trip to New Orleans, which pretty much makes it a lock for a Gambit appearance in “God and Man”!

THE ISSUE ITSELF

Mutant X #16 is cover dated January of 2000.  It has Howard Mackie as writer, Cary Nord on pencils, and Andrew Pepoy on inks.

A young mutant is chased through a playground in Savannah, Georgia.  His pursuers, a group of heavily armed mutant haters, are halted by the arrival of Captain America, who is quickly joined by the rest of The Six.  The Six make quick work of the group, leaving them frozen in place, where they are discovered some time later by Nick Fury and SHIELD, who are now using Bastion-model Sentinels to track mutants.  The Six walk the streets of New Orleans, tracking mutants that Cerebro has gotten a read on.  They are attacked by members of the United Guilds of Thieves and Assassins, who take them to see “The Boss,” who is revealed to be Gambit.  In this reality he is married Bella Donna, and they have a daughter, Raven, both of whom he keeps around to prevent him from making rash decisions.  Gambit remarks he knows most of the group by reputation, only having crossed paths with Bloodstorm directly.  His debt to Ororo is what kept him from killing the others, but now he wants them out of his town, so as to avoid troubles with SHIELD.  While Gambit and Havok engage in a heated argument, SHIELD’s new Sentinels attack, and Gambit believes Havok has deliberately led them here.  When it is revealed that Raven is the mutant the Sentinels are after, The Six assist Gambit and Bella Donna in protecting her.  Bella Donna is fatally wounded during the battle, and her brother Julien is revealed to be the traitor.  Cerebro reveals that Raven has powers that are off the charts, which is why SHIELD wants her.  The Six and Gambit attempt to stop Julien and the Sentinels from taking Raven, but fail.  With his wife dead and his daughter kidnapped, Gambit joins the Six to rescue his daughter and seek out vengeance.

This issue finally points us towards a proper six-man line-up for “The Six”, so things are finally feeling a little bit more in the direction of a proper status quo.  The addition of Gambit isn’t quite as odd-ball or game-changing as Cap, since he’s already an established X-Man, but it’s similarly kind of out of nowhere.  It does seem a bit odd that The Six winds up having their numbers filled back in by two characters that didn’t appear at all prior to Madelyn and Fallen’s departure, instead of building up previously introduced characters a bit (the fact that Cerebro continues to travel along with the team but isn’t given a proper spot on the roster is honestly baffling).  It also a bit of a shame that the team is now down to a single token female.  At this point, Gambit doesn’t feel terribly different from his mainstream counterpart, but there’s certainly some room for him to grow.  The actual storyline from the issue is a bit back to basics, early run, since its another case of the team wandering somewhere and things sort of happening around them.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

This issue is the last one on the path to getting the group back to where they were when I re-encountered them back in the day, so there’s a degree of completeness for me that comes from that.  I don’t dislike Gambit, but I also know he’s paving the way for more Bloodstorm stuff, and that’s not my favorite.

I snagged this whole run from my usual comics stop, Cosmic Comix, so I want to give them a shout out here, because it was a pretty great find.